Jack Metcalf was a Republican politician from Whidbey Island who was in the Washington State Senate for many years and finally made it into Congress. He was an odd duck — deeply conservative, with a populist streak. When I heard that he was a gold bug, I looked into it, and I discovered that he was not that at all, but something much more unusual: a greenbacker. This was the 1980s, and nobody knew what a greenbacker was. So I wrote about it. This is the amalgam of two stories I had in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer of October 19, 1987, the day stocks crashed 500 points on Wall Street.

 

         The strangest measure on the Nov. 3 ballot is surely Referendum 41, State Sen. Jack Metcalf’s crusade to challenge the legality of Federal Reserve Notes. Metcalf argues that the Constitution’s grant to Congress of the power “to coin money [and] regulate the value thereof” cannot be delegated. The Fed, says Referendum 41, is subject to “no oversight or control by any elected body or official.” 

         Metcalf, 59, a soft-spoken and earnest Republican from Langley on Whidbey Island, is a former high-school history teacher. His crusade springs straight out of the history books of the 19th century. 

         A century ago, an impassioned battle raged over the monetary system. The conflict echoes faintly today in the arguments about interest rates, but in those days it was anything but faint. At stake was whether the nation would restrict the money supply to the amount of gold the government had, or expand it with a lot of new silver or paper dollars. In that struggle the gold people were the conservatives, the “free silver” people the liberals, and the paper-money people the radicals — the bank-hating “greenbackers.”

         Metcalf is a greenbacker.

         The first greenbacks were issued in the Civil War. To pay for the war, Abraham Lincoln’s Congress authorized the Treasury to print $450 million in United States Notes. They were not redeemable in gold, and traded at a discount to coin. After the war, the government took 15 years to shrink the money supply so it could resume paying gold coin for paper at the old rate.

         The result was a credit squeeze on farmers. Farm-belt populists, who hated city bankers, started the Greenback Party. They elected 14 congressmen in 1878. Their goals, wrote Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in A Monetary History of the United States, “included a plentiful supply of currency, destruction of the ‘money monopoly,’ elimination of foreign capitalists in the United States, and reduction in the burden of debt.”

         Except for the part about foreign capitalists, those are Jack Metcalf’s goals.

         In 1879 the dollar became convertible into gold, and the greenbackers faded away. They regrouped in 1892 as the People’s Party, and embraced “free silver” — the idea that the government buy silver at a high fixed price and coin it. In 1896 they won over the Democratic Party. Its evangelical nominee, William Jennings Bryan, vowed in his acceptance speech that he would not “crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

Bryan lost, and the dollar remained convertible into gold until 1933. But the gold standard was prone to crises. After the Panic of 1907, Congress created the Federal Reserve System, and after the Crash of 1929, Franklin Roosevelt took the nation off gold. Paper money today is all Federal Reserve Notes.

         Well, almost all. Lincoln’s greenbacks were never fully withdrawn, and an occasional $2 or $100 United States Note, reprinted and reissued, can occasionally be found to this day. Jack Metcalf certainly hasn’t forgotten them. He says they’re the only legal paper money in circulation.

         Metcalf says the only other legal money is coin, because coins are made by the Treasury. In April 1981, at the beginning of his anti-Fed crusade, Metcalf got his name in the news by insisting that a $383 expense check be cashed in Susan B. Anthony dollars. Endorsing his check, he wrote, “It is hereby noted that in cashing this check I will accept only constitutional, lawful money.”

         Gold advocate Kent Pullen, a Republican state senator from Kent, shuddered. “I said, ‘Jack, you just undermined all those principles you stood for by accepting those cheap Susan B. Anthony dollars.’ ”

         But Metcalf stands for different principles. He wants to replace the Federal Reserve with a new system under which all money would be created by the Treasury. For tactical reasons, Referendum 41 specifies what it’s against, not what it’s for. Says Metcalf, “I’m not getting into a fight with the gold and non-gold people.”

         On Sept. 6, 1987, Metcalf held a press conference at the Seattle Sheraton Hotel, where the 1988 presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party, Ron Paul, endorsed Referendum 41. The Libertarians favor a gold standard to preserve the value of currency and limit the power of government.

         Metcalf wants to limit the power of bankers. He wants low interest rates and a lightening in the burden of debt. The Bible, he says, condemns the sin of usury, the charging of an unreasonable rate of interest. “I don’t know when ‘interest’ ends and ‘usury’ begins,” he says with earnest deliberation, “but 10 percent interest is criminal looting.”

         Metcalf was a teenager during the 1930s Depression, and recalls the mass unemployment and suffering that the wise men of the day could not explain. Says he, “I remember my parents saying, ‘There’s something wrong with the money.’ ”

         He also remembers his first home mortgage, in the 1940s, at 4.75 percent. The 1940s had low rates because Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman kept the Fed under the Treasury’s thumb, to support the sale of war bonds. All during World War II, the bank prime rate was stuck at 1.5 percent, and nobody thought of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board as a power to rival the President.

         The Fed broke free of the Treasury during the Korean War and raised interest rates. Its power increased as it was called on to fight the inflation of the 1970s. By the 1980s, Fed Chairman Paul Volcker was considered the second most powerful man in Washington, D.C., and was accused of raising rates so high that it cost Jimmy Carter his re-election. 

         Volcker’s replacement, Alan Greenspan, has already raised rates. Metcalf reads into this evil omens. “We’re on the road to a terrible collapse,” he says. “I want to avoid that.”

         To get Referendum 41 on the ballot, Metcalf has made allies unusual for a conservative. For years, a key ally was Jim Bender, president of the King County Central Labor Council. Bender was a lunch-bucket populist. He had a column in The Scanner,the King County union paper, where he would rail against the banks and high interest rates.

         Bender died earlier this year. Labor’s man on the Referendum 41 committee now is Bob Dilger, executive secretary of the Washington State Building and Construction Trades Council in Olympia. “High interest rates hurt our members tremendously,” he says.

         Referendums are put on the ballot by the legislature. Metcalf has pushed his referendum through a Democratic legislature by making common cause with labor liberals such as Rep. Eugene Lux, Seattle Democrat, who was chairman of the Financial Institutions and Insurance Committee. Another tactic was to cast un-conservative votes, such as the one earlier this year for retroactive unemployment pay for locked-out workers at Lockheed Shipyard. Soon after that, Referendum 41 was passed out of the Senate Financial Institutions Committee chaired by Seattle Democrat Ray Moore.

         Through the skillful trading of votes, Metcalf pushed his measure single-handedly through an indifferent legislature. It passed the Senate 36-9 and the House 77-17.

         In fact, this is the second time he’s done it. In 1982 Metcalf coaxed his fellow legislators into passing a resolution that the state file a lawsuit challenging the Federal Reserve. Attorney General Ken Eikenberry, a Republican, refused to file it. A lawsuit had no chance to succeed, Eikenberry said, and was a waste of taxpayers’ money. That’s why Referendum 41 instructs the Legislature to hire a private attorney to file the suit.

         Metcalf’s position, as laid out in his self-published book, The 200-Year Debate: Who Shall Issue the Nation’s Money?,is that the Federal Reserve is “a federally chartered private banking consortium” that keeps money scarce and interest rates high.

         It would be hard to find a bank officer who believes this, or a professor of money and banking. But Metcalf believes it.

To be sure, the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks have some attributes of a private company: They receive no money from Congress, and their employees are not civil service or in the federal pension system. They issue stock to commercial banks like Seafirst and Rainier, and they have private-sector directors. George Weyerhaeuser, for example, is a director of the San Francisco Fed. Also, in telephone directories, the Federal Reserve is listed in the White Pages rather than the government’s Blue Pages.

         And the Fed does make a profit by its monopoly on printing paper money. But the profit all goes to the Treasury. Fed policy is set by the Federal Reserve Board, most of whose members are appointed by the President of the United States. The stock owned by commercial banks has no votes.

         Is the Federal Reserve controlled by commercial banking interests? Vance Roley, a professor of banking and finance at the University of Washington, says, “That’s ridiculous.” Roley once worked for the St. Louis Fed. “I attended some board of directors meetings in Kansas City,” he recalls. “I never saw any attempt by commercial bankers to influence the Fed’s actions.”

         Economists do take seriously the prospect of politicians influencing the Fed’s actions. A few favor greater control. “I think there is a perfectly good case for saying the Fed should be part and parcel of the Treasury, because the Treasury is going to have every interest in keeping rates down,” says William McDonald Wallace, chief research economist for the Boeing Commercial Airplane Co. Like Metcalf, Wallace recalls the low interest rates during and after World War II, when the Federal Reserve was less independent. “During that period we had the highest sustained growth in our history,” he says.

         Most economists believe that direct political control of the money supply, which Metcalf’s proposal amounts to, is a recipe for printing-press money. “You can’t make interest rates low by printing more money,” says Michael Veseth, associate professor of economics at the University of Puget Sound — and a member of the committee to oppose Referendum 41. “We have examples of that in the world: Argentina, Brazil.” 

         Metcalf denies his aim is to create inflation. He just wants to lower interest rates so the little man can get a loan. Nor does he think his referendum odd. “This is the first time in America,” he says, “that the people have been asked to vote on the money system.”

 

© 1987 The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

         

         Referendum 41 got only 35 percent of the vote. But Metcalf kept plugging away. In the Republican sweep of November 1994, on his fourth attempt to get into Congress, he was elected to the House of Representatives. His opponent tried to use his crusade against the Federal Reserve against him, calling him “an absolute kook.” Metcalf downplayed his monetary ideas. At 66, he just wanted to go to Washington and balance the budget — an old idea that voters were ready to support. He was a member of the House of Representatives from Jan. 1995 to Jan. 2001. He died in 2007.